Complete Atopia Chronicles

“Who’s my cute little baby boy?” Cindy whispered at Little Ricky-Two, shaking him softly and then squeezing him into her body. He burbled with delight, and cuddled his head into her as she held him.

“Are you okay?” I asked Cindy.

“Yes, of course,” she replied unconvincingly. Shrugging and smiling, she held the synthetic baby ever tighter.

A cicada’s whine played high in the distance, and I squinted into the sunlight slanting through the apple trees and watched her doting over the proxxid. This was all very nice, but my uneasiness was wearing my patience thin. I’d been more than ready to move onto the real thing for a while.

I held up one hand to shield my eyes from the sun and asked, “How about we step this one quickly through his age profiles, maybe see what he’d be like at five years old tomorrow?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Then maybe as a twenty-something the day after?”

Cindy shot me a hateful look and tightly cradled Little Ricky-Two.

“No, we don’t need to do that. I already have a pretty good idea.”

Feeling irritated, I looked down to inspect some crab grass sprouting desperately out from under one of the feet of the table. A breeze rippled the struggling blades of grass as I watched, bringing with it the moldering decay of spoiled apples out in the yard. I looked back up at Cindy, straining my eyes against the setting sun.

“What do you mean, you have a good idea?” I asked. “We only let the first Little Ricky develop to about five, and Derek was just a baby when we terminated. Don’t you want to see what they’ll be like when they’re older?”

“Rick, you just know these things when you’re a mother.”

She sighed.

“You can look at the simulations of them older if you like, but I don’t need to.”

She held Little Ricky-Two up in front of her and began cooing softly at him.

The discussion was apparently over. I felt both uncomfortable and annoyed. Little Ricky-Two was wearing tiny stone washed denim dungarees and a checked red shirt, just how we used to dress up the original Little Ricky.

“Isn’t that what the proxxids are for?” I asked her, my frustration beginning to mount.

“Honey,” she answered, still staring at Little Ricky-two, “I don’t want to argue with you, okay? It’s just not something I want to do.”

I sat for a moment, quietly putting my emotions in order before responding while I watched her nuzzling the proxxid some more.

“Cindy, please, put Little Ricky-Two down for a second.”

“Okay, Mr. Big Ricky,” she replied finally. She turned and sat the baby on her lap, cradling him defensively. Looking up at me, she was about to say something but I cut her off.

“Can we turn this simulation off for a minute?” I asked. “I’m really not comfortable here anymore.”

Hurt blossomed in her eyes and she seemed to resist for a moment, glancing back and forth at the cottage and then at me. She hesitated. Sensing my aggravation, the apple orchard and cottage faded away.

She still sat holding Little Ricky-Two in her arms and on her lap, but we were sitting back at our own dining room table in real space. Behind her, light danced down from the kelp forests, illuminating a school of angel fish that were swimming past the window walls of our apartment.

I leaned forward towards her and put one hand on her knee and said, “Cindy, I love you honey.”

“And I love you too.”

She took my cue to hold my hand in hers, but she held tightly onto the proxxid with her other arm.

“I know this was all my idea,” I explained, “and I’ve enjoyed it, and I think we’ve learnt a lot, but I think this is enough, don’t you? It’s time to get onto the real thing, don’t you think?”

I waited, expecting the worst.

She just smiled. “Yes, I think you’re right. This is enough.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “So we can move onto the real thing?”

She smiled back at me and bounced Little Ricky-Two on her knee.

“Well, give me a little time to myself, no?”

§

As suddenly as it had started, it was over.

The next day I came home from work and there were no more proxxids. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted from me. We were child free for the first time in months, like we were proxxid empty-nesters. It was a shock to my system to begin with—coming home to find only Cindy waiting for me, with no new proxxid to play with.

In retrospect, I’d actually enjoyed the process of picking out the perfect baby for us. Putting it all behind us felt like we’d crossed an important threshold, and I looked forward to having a real baby.

Most important, the experience seemed to have recreated Cindy. She was happy to simply be alive, and the clouds of her chronic depression had lifted. I figured it was the prospect of finally having a child together, the whole process we’d been through. Each day I would return from work and she was energized and refreshed, and we would enjoy long lovemaking sessions more often than not.